How I Do Dessert

Baked Chocolate Mousse with Sumac Strawberries and Salted Pistachios

🎉 Welcome to my newsletter, The Boy Who Bakes, a subscriber-supported newsletter, dedicated to all things baked. For more bonus posts, filled with exclusive recipes just like this one, you can become a paid subscriber for the weekly newsletter, Second Helpings. It costs just £5 a month and, as well as the weekly recipes, that also unlocks access to the full archive of past recipes. To subscribe, to either the paid or free newsletter, click the link below.🎉

How do you do dessert?

When you have friends or family coming to visit, I assume, since you’re subscribed to this newsletter, that you’re the type of person who

likes to look after people, to cook for them, to welcome them with homemade bread or maybe a batch of brownies? Well, I like to make them dessert. If you come for dinner and I’ve made you dessert, that is my way of saying I care. But don’t think I threw that dessert together at the last minute. The more likely scenario is that I have been obsessing about that dessert for the entire week preceding your visit. I want the dessert to be the best thing you ate that week. I put in the effort.

With friends visiting this weekend, I have, of course, been planning dessert for the past week. I might not know what I am cooking (even as I write this Friday afternoon), but you better believe I’ve had the dessert planned, and, in this case, I have actually been testing out the recipe all week! Talking about my dessert fixations with my fiancé, he has distilled how I think about dessert in the following way: all desserts I make generally consist of the central focus, something saucy, something creamy, and something crunchy. The central focus might be a slice of a tart or a warm ginger pudding or, in this case, a baked chocolate mousse.

A few months ago I was working on a similar chocolate dessert, but that recipe ended up going in a totally different direction, and so this week I’ve decided to revisit the original idea. I was thinking about flourless chocolate cakes and how the method and slight variations in the recipe can radically transform the final texture. As a flourless chocolate cake is effectively a baked chocolate mousse, I decided to have a play around with a recipe I was taught many years ago, the chocolate marquise.

The marquise, as a dessert, varies quite a bit depending on who you’re talking to. In one kitchen, in which I staged, it was a set chocolate custard. In another it was a frozen chocolate mousse which was made with a decent amount of butter. If I were to attempt a definition of the dish, it would be a form of chocolate mousse that is made with butter, sometimes baked, sometimes chilled, and sometimes frozen. It is the baked version of the recipe I wanted to explore. In the testing of this recipe, I tried to bake the mousse first at a relatively hot temperature, as I would any other flourless chocolate cake. But, because the cake is made with whipped eggs, the cake puffed up and ended up much like any other flourless chocolate cake. This was the exact opposite of what I was aiming for. On the following test runs, I baked the cake low and slow, with the addition of a water bath. This would ensure the cake baked as delicately as possible. If you’ve ever made a flan or crème brûlée, you know that baking these egg-based dishes in this manner will lead to the silkiest of textures. The same is basically true here. Instead of a puffed-up cake, this low-and-slow method results in a cake that is just set and which can be sliced but is also incredibly silky and mousse-like. If you’ve ever been to London’s River Cafe, their famous Chocolate Nemesis cake has a very similar texture. I’d argue my recipe is a tad easier though.

To serve the cake, I had to complete my holy trinity of creamy, saucy, and crunchy. For the creamy, I kept it simple and served the cake with a dollop of unsweetened whipped cream. For the sauce, I wanted something fruity and struggled to choose between strawberries (which have been SO good this year) and cherries, but, in the end, my love of strawberries won out. I borrowed an idea I first saw in an Ottolenghi recipe and roasted the strawberries with a little sumac. This citrussy spice gives the strawberries a gentle zing, which helps balance out the rich chocolate. To finish, I served the cake with a sprinkling of sugared and salted pistachios. I know this is rather a lot of elements, so do feel free to pick and choose as you see fit.